José Leaves After Completing the Spiral Staircase Without a Handrail

José’s completion of the staircase at Our Lady of Light Academy ends his work in a way that is as mysterious as the structure itself: the carpenter vanishes, leaving an unsupported staircase that the nuns interpret as a miracle and Lizzy cannot reconcile with the man she knew. The staircase is finished, but its builder’s identity remains uncertain; even the Bishop’s expectation that José will return for his pay cannot explain his disappearance.

The Finished Staircase

The discovery comes as a sudden interruption. Elinora bursts into the parlor to announce that the staircase is finished and that Ramona found it completed when she went to take the carpenter his supper. José is already gone. Lizzy drops her knitting and runs to the church, where the other girls and the nuns have gathered to look up at the work.

Its form invites close inspection. The polished wood rises from the ground to the choir loft in a graceful circular sweep, with thirty-three carefully trimmed steps. Sister Roberta counts two full turns and identifies seven splices on the inside and nine on the outside. These are not incidental details: they make the staircase’s craft visible even as they intensify the question of how it could have been completed so quickly. Sister Roberta judges the work incredible and impossible for one man to have finished in so short a time.

The structure offers no reassuring answer to the practical question of whether it will hold. It has neither railing nor supports, and appears to stand without anything holding it up. Mother Magdalena asks whether it is safe; Sister Roberta proposes testing it, noting that she is the heaviest person present. The account records the proposal, not the result of a test. What the assembled witnesses can see is the staircase itself: solid and polished in the candlelight, yet apparently unsupported.

A Miracle, or a Carpenter?

The nuns’ explanation is immediate and religious. After asking what the staircase means, they hear Mother Magdalena declare that Saint Joseph must have come after all and that the carpenter was Saint Joseph. The nuns kneel and pray. Lizzy, by contrast, stares at them as though they have lost their senses, then runs from the chapel. Their reactions turn the finished staircase into a dispute over how to understand what has happened: as extraordinary handiwork, or as evidence of a saint’s intervention.

Lizzy’s hesitation is grounded in personal memory rather than a technical explanation. She recalls a man who spoke with her, listened to her troubles, held her kitten, and advised her about her father. He had also told her of his sadness at leaving his own family and his hurt that the girls had not wanted him around. These recollections do not prove who he was; they make the nuns’ certainty difficult for Lizzy to accept without question. The figure they identify as Saint Joseph is, in her memory, someone who was lonely and wounded by rejection.

The episode therefore does not settle the carpenter’s identity through Lizzy’s experience. Her memories make him recognizably human, while the speed and apparent impossibility of the staircase allow the nuns to see a saint. The two interpretations remain beside one another. The work is real and observable; the explanation for its completion and the carpenter’s disappearance is not supplied.

The Departure Confirmed

At first, the convent assumes that José has gone to the barn after finishing, without supper because he was tired. Early the next morning, Lizzy crosses the snow to the barn, telling herself that she is there to feed Ben and walk him around the yard. She hopes to ask Mother Magdalena for permission to ride to the Bishop’s farm, and privately wishes she could visit Mrs. Lacey and Robert. Her ordinary plans continue amid the extraordinary news: she feeds Ben and asks what happened to the carpenter’s mule.

A man who had checked the animals after supper reports that the mule was there then but gone by morning. The Bishop, summoned by the nuns, examines the staircase, calls it beautiful, and remains properly puzzled. He tells the excited girls there will be no hysteria or fasting, and no new religious callings; his pointed look is directed at Elinora. He also asks those present to keep the discovery quiet until people come to mass the following morning, rather than invite a crowd to the convent.

The Bishop expects José to return for his pay, but Lizzy’s report that the mule is gone complicates that expectation. The carpenter never comes back. By the time the convent holds a supper in his honor the following Wednesday, the tubs he used to soak the wood and his tools have disappeared from the property as well, and the mule is never seen again. The supper goes ahead despite his absence, with the Bishop presiding and wearing his violet vest, which he otherwise wears only at Christmas. The gathering honors the carpenter’s work, but cannot bring him back or establish where he has gone.

An Unresolved Ending

José’s departure gives the staircase episode its lasting tension. The convent possesses an elaborate finished structure, detailed enough to count and inspect, while lacking the carpenter, his tools, and even the mule that might have carried him away. The Bishop’s belief that José will return for payment briefly treats his absence as temporary; the missing equipment and the failure to collect his pay make that expectation increasingly doubtful.

Nor does the community’s celebration resolve the question of what the staircase means. The nuns’ prayers affirm Mother Magdalena’s account, while Lizzy’s remembered conversations resist reducing the carpenter to a miraculous identity. The narrative supplies evidence for wonder and for human attachment, but no final confirmation that the carpenter was Saint Joseph or an explanation of how he completed the staircase. José’s work remains in the chapel; José himself is gone.